A dentist for every 2,430 residents. AI found the ones who’d call this one.
Contra Costa County is one of the most crowded dental markets in America — 51% more practices per resident than the national average, with clicks priced to match. PracticeNova tested distinct patient segments for a Concord family practice, found that the cheapest patients to reach were not the ones most practices chase, and delivered 349 patient calls at roughly half the category’s cost per lead.
An expensive market to guess in
Concord sits in a corridor with an estimated 70 to 90 dental practices. Competitors run 500+ reviews and same-day technology. Clicks are priced accordingly.
In a market this dense, the cost of a wrong assumption compounds fast. Spend a quarter marketing to the wrong patient segment and you have not just wasted the budget — you have lost the quarter. The practice needed to know which kinds of patient its own market would actually respond to, and it needed to find out without betting the year on a hunch.
Segments tested in parallel
Rather than one broad campaign, the platform built a separate campaign for each patient segment the market analysis flagged as plausible — then let the market answer.
Cost per phone call by campaign, over the full six-month period. Bar length is proportional to cost per call — shorter is better.
Six months of steady delivery
Not a launch spike that faded. Calls arrived every month the campaigns were live, through budget changes, segment tests and a mid-period restructure.
Phone calls per month. Hatched columns are partial months — campaigns began 24 January and the period closes 23 July. 343 of the 349 calls were answered by the practice.
How PracticeNova built and ran it
Every campaign was generated by AI — the segments, the targeting, the copy and the creative — from a strategy the platform wrote by reading this specific market. Then it kept running them.
Read the local market
Competitor density, demographics, underserved segments and what the available demand can realistically absorb.
Set the brand voice
Drafts how the practice should sound. Every asset generated downstream is bound by it.
Generate the campaigns
Audiences, targeting, budgets, headlines and creative — AI-built and policy-checked for healthcare advertising.
Launch and watch hourly
Live across search, with every call traced to the campaign, ad and search term that caused it.
Tune around the clock
Budget follows what converts and is scheduled into the hours that produce calls. Weak segments are cut early.
The AI does the research, the writing and the building — but nothing a patient will see goes live without the practice signing off. That gate never comes out of the loop.
The results
Six months, measured against published benchmarks for dental advertising on Google.
| Metric | Mt. Diablo | Dental benchmark | Difference |
|---|---|---|---|
| Cost per lead | $41.90 | $83.93 | 50% lower |
| Cost per click | $5.32 | $7.85 | 32% lower |
| Conversion rate | 12.70% | 9.08% | 40% higher |
| Patient calls | 349 | — | — |
Leads are tracked phone conversions. Benchmarks are published 2025 averages for the dentistry category on Google Ads. Achieved in a county with 51% more dental practices per resident than the national average. Media cost only.
“I had guesses about which patients we should be going after. What I got instead was an answer — and it wasn’t the one I would have bet on. The ads sound like us, and they have not stopped improving since the day they went up.”
Which patients does your market actually reward?
PracticeNova reads your local market, builds the campaigns, tests the segments, and keeps optimising around the clock.
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